Musings and Sometimes Rants about the non-equal status of Fathers in Family Law and Parenting. Additionally periodic comparisons to the treatment of men compared to women in other areas including health care.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The tragic Campione case and the abusive manner in which the system treated the Father.

Here is what the hired gun lawyer for the killer mom said about the person who killed her two daughters.

"Her lawyer, Mary Cremer, argued that her client was a loving mother who struggled with mental illness." Is it any wonder few can believe what lawyers say.

What an oxymoronic statement. It is very common in Family Courts to raise false allegations of abuse. This is taught by unscrupulous lawyers and feminists , particularly those operating in DV Shelters. Loving moms don't kill their children but those with serious emotional instability do with greater frequency than biological fathers. http://victimfeministcentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/mothers-commit-vast-majority-of.html

We have a woman with some personality disorders. There is a cult of moms who have lost custody who call themselves "protective parents." My research and observation of them shows them to be a vile and destructive group of individuals who were abusive to their children. This one took the delusion to the extreme by killing her progeny. It is also the most extreme form of Parental Alienation where the parent tries to keep the children from the other through hate. What it all boils down to is the woman hated her hubby far more than she could ever love her children.

The actions by the courts in requiring Mr. Campione to use Supervised Access to see his children are part of the matriarchal controls present throughout Child Custody and Family Law. As much as he advised those in charge, especially the Barrie based Children's Aid Society, the children were in danger he was ignored. The belief is men are bad - women are benign despite the aggregated evidence to the contrary. Most CAS' are female run and highly biased against dads and highly favourable toward maternal custody. Some will spend 10's of thousands of dollars, as is Chatham-Kent CAS right now to remove loving dads from their children's lives.

They are not accountable to any one at this time except for their financials. The Ontario Ombudsman has no jurisdiction and the Minister, Laurel Broten, ignores complaints.

You can thank feminist mythology for this state of affairs. They believe and have convinced the Police, Judges, Lawyers politicians and social services that men are coercive abusers and women innocent victims.

If any one has read the details of this case and the actions of this woman you will be truly sickened at the depravity.

False Allegations of abuse against dads means sure fire custody. In contested custody cases local DV shelters and lawyers will offer oblique suggestions to moms, who may not have been abused, to place it in their affidavit to ensure custody and supervised access for dads. For some moms this is one more quotient of revenge. Perjury is commonplace in Family Court and never prosecuted. The lawyers and DV shelters know the ropes.

In addition, the DV shelter will require the mom to sign a non-disclosure agreement to ensure their advice doesn’t get into the public domain. Studies have shown family law related false allegations of abuse, some requiring protection orders, can be as high as 70%. The killer was following established protocols in the war against dads occurring every day across the country and supported by incompetent social service agencies like the Children’s Aid Society.

Approximately 280 Divorces a weekday across Canada

There is a very large and lucrative divorce industry in Canada. Discounting for weekends and holidays we see about 280 divorces per working day. Lawyers rake in billions and the social services, mental health segments also profit handsomely especially in contested custody cases.

Moms get physical custody in over 90% of cases. The judge in this case is typical. They receive training from a secretive organization called the National Judicial Institute. This training tells judges men are abusers and women benign. If a woman claims she is abused she is to be believed without any evidentiary standards. This judge clearly believes this very disturbed killer is believable despite the jury’s verdict. This judge is but one of many spouting the same drivel.

The myth of male only Domestic Violence and he myth of Patriarchal Oppression

The DV industry, the Judge and the CAS in Barrie who support the junk science in the Duluth Wheel of patriarchal oppression of women in Canada, outside of the real oppression by certain religious cults, can give no explanation for the greater degree of violence in Lesbian relationships as compared to heterosexual. Lie and Gentlewarrior surveyed 1,099 lesbians, finding that 52% had been a victim of violence by their female partner, 52% said they had used violence against their female partner, and 30% said they had used violence against a non-violent female partner. Finally, Lie, Schilit, Bush, Montague and Reyes (1991) reported, in a survey of 350 lesbians, that rates of verbal, physical and sexual abuse were all significantly higher in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships: 56.8% had been sexually victimized by a female, 45% had experienced physical aggression, and 64.5% experienced physical or emotional aggression. Of this sample of women, 78.2% had been in a prior relationship with a man. Reports of violence by men were all lower than reports of violence in prior relationships with women (sexual victimization, 41.9% (vs. 56.8% with women); physical victimization 32.4% (vs. 45%) and emotional victimization 55.1% (vs. 64.5%). (See Patriarchy And Wife Assault: The Ecological Fallacy by Donald G. Dutton, Ph.D. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia)

Domestic Violence in Canada Fact vs Fiction

Mrs. Campione based on her mental health profile and the fact she killed two innocents is far more likely to be the abuser not her husband. The judge, through his comments, showed a clear lack of knowledge on the abuse by partners of both genders, in this country. Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile, 2005. An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men representing 653,000 women and 546,000 men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive Statistics Canada report on family violence. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/Daily/English/050714/d050714a.htm

Keep in mind what you see in the paper is what is reported to police. The numbers above from Stats Canada are those based on surveys which are more comprehensive.

Unfortunately in Canada, and indeed most English speaking western democracies, this judge’s biases are widely held. This one just made it all too blatant in his remarks. As stated earlier 90% of physical custody in Canada goes to mom based on similar rhetoric, not fact, this judge espouses. Its no accident 75% of women initiate divorce because the evidence is clear they will win custody of the children, they will be guaranteed tax free income in a child support award of over $700.00 a month for two children if dad grosses close to $50,000.00 a year, no matter if mom makes far more than the newly removed father. That $8,400.00 being tax free is equivalent to over $10,000.00 if taxable. They may get alimony if they can create a sad enough story, including false allegations of violence, and they will get 50% of all assets accumulated during the marriage.

If 90% of something went to a single party – say jobs to white anglophones in the public service we would be shouting from the rooftops. It appears to be OK in Family Law to discriminate in a sexist manner against dads. Think about it and then wonder why many TV commercials show dads as bumbling idiots. We men accept it – well at least most do – but if we were to give an opinion on why so many bilingual francophones from Quebec dominate public service positions we have strong opinions, White males – actually in Family Law – all males are not in the back seat of the bus – they are kicked off.

Stong is an ex Liberal politician in the Superior Court of Justice. This Judge, therefore, does Family Law cases. No dad stands a chance in his court. He has to go.

This is but one of many Family Law cases where identity and gender politics play a role causing the worst of negative outcomes for children. Justice Stong evidenced his gender biased views in his remarks in effect blaming the dad - a victim - and excusing the vicious and evil mom. Stong is an ex-Liberal member of the Ontario legislature. A further tragedy is he handles Family Law Cases and no dad stands a chance for custody in his court. He should be removed but that will not happen. No federal judge has ever been removed for bias or incompetence. Children become the recipients of many negative outcomes with the sole custody model in Canada. Ninety percent of physical custody goes to mom in a sexist and biased legal system. Children would be far better of in a shared/equal parenting environment as proposed in Bill C-422. Get behind the bill and help prevent further tragedies. The kids will have both fit parents in their lives and be better protected.

I am always very surprised when I see statements like “How can a mother kill her children”. I have concluded these folks just don’t know the facts. These facts are clearly tabulated by some government agencies every year. In the USA for a very long time the evidence is moms are the most likely killers and abusers of their children. It ought to be no different in Canada except Stats. Can. does not break the figures down like the USA and Australia. In those countries they separate out the male parties as Biological Father and other. If you want the truth about moms being the most common killers and abusers go here for the data. The links in the tabulated evidence over many years will take you to the original source data. http://victimfeministcentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/mothers-commit-vast-majority-of.html The first graph shows the situation for Western Australia in 2006-07 where there were 21 child homicides. Mom killed 11, her new partner or boyfriend killed 5 and the biological father 5. So mom and her new partner killed 16 of the 21. A child is far less protected when the biological father is removed and this occurs hundreds of times a working day across Canada. Mom gets sole physical custody in 90% of cases. Dad, if lucky, gets 15% visitation but the new boyfriend sees the children 24/7.

November 17, 2010 – 10:31 am

REUTERS/J.P. Moczuls

A relative comforts Leo Campione (L) as Campione leaves a funeral service for his two daughters Serena, 3, and Sophia, 1, outside St. Peter's Catholic Church in Woodbridge, a Toronto suburb, October 10, 2006. The girls were believed to be murdered by his estranged wife Elaine in Barrie, Ontario, on October 4.

He just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Judge Alfred Stong, I mean, who presided over the Elaine Campione murder trial. Two days ago the jury brought in a decision of first-degree murder and a 25-year sentence against Elaine Campione, who freely confessed to drowning her two little girls in a bathtub, and who freely stated in a videotape that her motivation was hatred for, and revenge against her husband Leo.

The trial was over, But Judge Stong added comments after the verdict announcement suggesting that if had the power to overturn the jury’s verdict, he would. He said, “It is more than disconcerting to think that if Campione had not been so abused, so used and discarded as a person, her two daughters could still be alive…” Judge Stong was determined that even if it is Campione that gets locked up, Canadians would know that the real villain, morally speaking, is Leo Campione, the father of the dead girls (even though his alleged abusiveness was entirely based on his wife’s allegations and never proved), and it is actually the “discarded” Elaine Campione who is the victim.

Judge Stong felt such personal animus against the grieving father that he wanted to deny Mr. Campione and his parents their opportunity to read a victim-impact statement, standard practice even with mandatory- sentencing cases. He only relented under strong pressure from the prosecutor, who reminded the judge that the murdered girls had been “an extremely important part of [Mr. Campione's] life.”

The judge’s attitude is shameful. But what can you expect from someone who has been trained – literally, judges take structured learning programs steeped in feminist myths and misandric conspiracy theories – that women are never abusive or violent unless they have been driven to it by an abusive male. Judge Stong just could not get it into his head – he alluded to the “unimaginable facts of this case” – that a woman could kill her children without a motivation involving a controlling male that somehow drove her to the act.

Why did it not occur to the judge to blame the CAS? The CAS was well aware of Elaine Campione’s quixotic and alarming history. They knew that Campione had exhibited many signs of psychosis, that she had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards, believed people were out to kill her and kidnap her children, and exhibiting such bizarre and/or negligent behaviours toward her girls that mother-substitutes, including her own mother, had to be constantly parachuted into her household if it was to function at all.

Yet the CAS decided the mother was the “safe parent.” Mr. Campione fought like a tiger and indebted himself trying to wrest control of the children from a woman he knew to be unstable and a potential risk to them, but nobody listened to him. Why? Because everyone licenced to deal with family issues on behalf of the state – social service agencies, police, lawyers and judges – are trained in the same mythology about women as Judge Stong was. They are all singing from the same hymn book: trust the woman, suspect the man, even when the evidence screams not to.

Let a man raise his hand once to a woman (or not, but simply be accused of doing so), and he will be whisked out of his children’s lives for a year at least. You can be sure that if the father of these children had exhibited one-hundredth of the myriad clues to Elaine Campione’s potential risk to her children’s safety, the CAS would have eaten him for breakfast.

The “system” didn’t fail Elaine Campione. The system failed those two little girls by enabling a woman’s psychosis at the expense of her children. There is nothing “unimaginable” in this case at all. It has all happened before.

Everyone involved in this fiasco should be locked up in a room and forced to review the case of Zachary Turner, the thirteen-month old baby who was drugged and drowned in Newfoundland in 2003 by his psychotic mother, Shirley, while she was out on bail for the third time on charges of murdering Zachary’s father. And after that forced to review the case of Toronto baby Jordan Heikamp, who in 2001 was starved to death by his mother under the blind eyes of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society (no jail time) and Toronto baby Sara Cao, abused to death in 2001 by her mother Elizabeth. Christie Blatchford, who covered that case, said the mother (again no jail time) “was treated by the system, and in the main by the media, as a pitiful [woman], worthy of sympathy.”

Sound familiar? Plus ça change. When fathers kill, they are not assigned any motivation but their own evil impulses. When mothers kill, everyone in the system kicks into denial mode, and assumes the fault has to lie elsewhere – anywhere, as long as the woman doesn’t have to take responsibility for her actions, and can be offered sympathy. When fathers show disturbing tendencies, the system acts, or tries to. When mothers show disturbing behaviour, the system protects the victimizer.

Little Sophia and Serena Campione did not have to die. They were allowed to die because of a belief system that denies the truth of human nature. Both men and women are capable of aggression.

Statistically in Canada, mothers abuse their children more than fathers. When will our society really consider the “best interests” of the child rather than throwing them under the bus of a superannuated and pernicious ideology?

Welcome to the Gulag of the oxymoronic name of the Family Responsibility Office operated by a Liberal, feminist Lawyer by the name of Madeleine Meilleur. This woman is as much responsible for the death of men like Mr. Donovan as are her apparatchiks. The FRO operates like the former East German secret police called the Stasi and are responsible for a great many suicides of dads. They are, as are the politicians supporting this persecution of many loving fathers who cannot afford to pay, disgraceful exhibits of human kind.

Barbara Kay, National Post · Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010

Last week Ontario announced it will begin impounding cars of fathers who fall behind in their child support payments. What, are mere licence suspensions not driving enough men to despair?

On Aug. 31 Paul Donovan, age 50, a reliable long-haul trucker, lay down beside train tracks near his home in London, Ont., and rolled himself into the path of an oncoming train. Most people would call it a suicide.

Not his common-law partner, Brenda Higgins. Ms. Higgins holds Ontario's Family Responsibility Office (FRO) liable for his death, and will launch a lawsuit to that effect.

Paul's ex-wife works, owns a home and drives a new car. Neither she nor their children -- today adults of 18 and 21 -- are, or ever were, impoverished. Paul had been paying regular child support since 1996. But during the trucking industry's recent hard times, Paul was temporarily unemployed, and missed two support payments.

Although he was soon back at work, Paul's commercial licence was suspended by the FRO. They refused to reinstate it without payment of $1,500 Paul hadn't yet earned. Their irrational licence suspension ensured he couldn't earn it. Ms. Higgins' scant income is only sufficient to support her three children. According to Ms. Higgins in a telephone interview, several pleas to negotiate the amount and schedule of payments with the FRO by Paul, his MPP and an ombudsman were rebuffed.

Bills mounted, but Paul's livelihood remained blocked. He couldn't afford a lawyer, and when he acted for himself a judge told him she couldn't help him. The FRO took him to court, petitioning for $10,000 or 188 days in jail. Appalled, Paul confided to Ms. Higgins he would rather die than serve such a sentence. Famous last words.

Every province has similar support-payment enforcement agencies. The FRO's Kafkaesque persecution of delinquent fathers is not unique to Ontario. These collection agencies are unaccountable, quasi-penal bodies. They hold powers to invade privacy without a warrant, and to impose criminal-level penalties for non-payment. But unlike defendants in criminal courts, FRO victims don't have the protections of due process.

I gained a fuller understanding of these inherently unjust agencies from a 2010 study in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society: "Punishing our way out of poverty: The Prosecution of Child-Support Debt in Alberta, Canada" by Nipissing University academic Paul Millar.

The privatization of child-support enforcement in the 1980s was conceived of as a means of reducing welfare handouts from the state. The initiative sprang not from politicians, but from legal academics who erroneously linked divorce to the impoverishment of women and children. The setting of guidelines was, according to Mr. Millar, "a judicially fostered social policy aimed at reducing poverty."

Imprisonment for debt is sometimes grouped with torture and slavery in human rights discourse, and was abolished here under the 1869 Debtor's Act as "not consistent with the morals of the day." Debtor's prison was only reinstated at the urging of radical feminist legal activists in the 1980s for one group: fathers behind on support payments.

In what Mr. Millar calls "inverted justice," Canada is one of a tiny handful of Western countries that jails men for an essentially civil offence without the procedural protections accorded real criminals, such as: the right to remain silent, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right to an impartial arbiter and the right to legal representation.

Reliable data demonstrates unequivocally that this regressive form of taxation disproportionately affects blacks, aboriginals and the poor, since the highest rates are reserved for those with the lowest income (under $20,000 a year). Moreover, so-called "deadbeat dads" can't declare bankruptcy. "Deadbeat dads" is, by the way, a terrible slur on the majority of dads who want to pay, but can't; women who deny fathers legal access to children are never jailed or called "deadbeat mums."

While out looking for Paul on the afternoon of Aug. 31, Ms. Higgins arrived at the scene of his suicide, not 50 metres from their home. Seeing the police cars and ambulance, she "knew" without asking. The trauma threw her into a suicidal depression resulting in a six-week hospital stay.

Tally: A healthy, responsible, productive man is dead, a partner devastated. Two middle-class children have lost a loved father, three children an engaged stepfather. At the time of his death Paul Donovan owed a measly $4,000 in child support.

Ms. Higgins can hear the trains go by as she struggles to sleep. Is there a winner in this story? If so, who?

About Me

I am Politically active and right of centre on most issues with the odd exception such as legalization of "Mary Jane".
I advocate on changes to Family Law - an incredibly dysfunctional arena where parents are pitted against one another and children are the victims.
My picture will sometimes show me as a younger man simply because I like them.

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Leading causes of Injury to Women 2006

In 2006, unintentional falls were the leading cause of nonfatal injury among women of every age group, and rates generally increased with age. Women aged 65 years and older had the highest rate of injury due to unintentional falls (59.7 per 1,000 women), while slightly more than 19 per 1,000 women aged 18–34 and 35–44 years experienced fall-related injuries. Unintentional injuries sustained as motor vehicle occupants were the second leading cause of injury among 18- to 34-year-olds (18.7 per 1,000), while unintentional overexertion was the second leading cause of injury among women aged 35–44 and 45–64 years (13.7 and 9.3 per 1,000, respectively). Among women aged 65 years and older, being unintentionally struck by or against an object was the second leading cause of injury (5.7 per 1,000).

Injury related Emergency Department Visits

Unintentional and intentional injuries each represented a higher proportion of emergency department (ED) visits for men than women in 2005. Among women and men aged 18 years and older, unintentional injuries accounted for 19.9 and 27.5 percent of ED visits, respectively, while intentional injuries, or assault, represented 1.4 and 2.7 percent of visits, respectively. Among both women and men, unintentional injury accounted for a higher percentage of ED visits among those living in non-metropolitan areas, while adults living in metropolitan areas had a slightly higher percentage of ED visits due to intentional injury.